The present invention relates to a printing device control apparatus and method and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method of controlling a plurality of printing devices.
Printing devices use various printing schemes including electrophotography (laser beam printer) and ejection of ink droplets of a printer (ink-jet printer).
Generally, a laser printer is suitable for monochromatic, i.e., black-and-white printing, and the print quality of black and white portions is high. In addition, the laser printer has a high speed. On the other hand, an ink-jet printer is suited to printing a color image, though its speed is lower than that of the laser beam printer.
When a document is to be prepared by a document processing apparatus (including a personal computer), often almost all pages are monochromatic, and only several pages require color printing.
In this case, as color page portions are present, the operator performs operations to output the entire document to a color ink-jet printer for printing, or to output only the color page portions of the document to the color ink-jet printer and thereafter print the remaining monochromatic pages with a laser beam printer dedicated to monochromatic printing.
In the former case, the operator needs to perform the operation only once because the printing operation is completed with only one printing instruction. However, with the color ink-jet printer, a long time is required to complete printing of all pages.
In the latter case, if the apparatus itself has only one printer interface, switching connection of the two printers is necessary, and the printing instruction must be given at least twice. Even if the apparatus has two printer interfaces, the printing instructions must still be given at least twice. This also applies to a case in which the printers are connected to a network, and the color ink-jet printer and monochromatic laser beam printer on the network (or one of the printers is a local printer) perform print processing.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the above problem, and has as its object to provide a print control apparatus and method of automatically selecting an optimum printing device according to the characteristics of a page to be printed in units of pages to print the page, thereby reducing the load on the operator in print processing.
To achieve the above object, according to the present invention, there is provided a print control apparatus for performing distributed printing using a plurality of printing devices having different printing characteristics, comprising:
determination means for receiving data to be printed from host processing and determining characteristics of the data in units of pages;
selection means for selecting one of the plurality of printing devices in accordance with a determination result from the determination means; and
sending means for sending data of one page determined by the determination means to the selected printing device.
According to a preferred aspect of the present invention, preferably, the apparatus further comprises first setting means for setting whether a replacement page is to be inserted, second setting means for setting a printing device for printing the replacement page, and second sending means for, when insertion of the replacement page is instructed by the first setting means, and the data of one page is to be sent to the sending means, sending data of the replacement page to the printing device set by the second setting means. With this arrangement, sorting of printouts which have been subjected to distributed printing in units of pages is facilitated.
The second sending means may send the data of one page which is sent to a printing device which is not set by the second setting means to the printing device set by the second setting means. With this arrangement, a printing device prints all pages while the other printing device prints only replacement pages. Although the output forms are different, pages to be replaced are obvious.
The second sending means may count the number of pages continuously sent to a printing device which is not set by the second setting means and send data corresponding to a count result to the printing device set by the second setting means. With this arrangement, the recording medium is not wasted.
The printing characteristic represents whether the printing device is capable of color printing, the determination means determines whether the data in units of pages contains information associated with color, and the selection means selects color printing when the information associated with color is present and monochromatic printing when no color information is present. With this arrangement, satisfactory printouts can be obtained for both monochromatic and color data at a high speed and low cost.
Other features and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the following description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which like reference characters designate the same or similar parts throughout the figures thereof.